Veni Diddy Vici

Render unto John Lucero…

Haven’t heard a great deal of buzz over the new Black Label video, which debuted a few weeks back, something that could be chalked up to people being busy tearing up obsolete Berrics brackets, downloading any of the other 40 videos that came out this summer, or still watching “Debacle” which is high in this blog’s personal running for top five vids of the year (maybe). Whatever the case it’s kind of a shame because the venerable Black Label spirit is very much intact through this new production, despite dumping half the team and making some questionable additions over the last couple years. Not that it means much, but when they put out that preview clip a few months ago, I didn’t know who half the dudes were, and this is coming from somebody who recently went out of their way to read a Slap board topic listing all their flow kids.

Scraggly speedster Vince Del Valle I had heard of, and mainly associated with that one Adidas ad where he’s doing a backside tailslide shove-it on a ledge above a set of stairs – it made a more interesting ad than usual because they’d gone with the still shot instead of the sequence, well-timed with the shove-it halfway to his feet, which probably incited a few arguments amongst the current crop of driveway kickflippers as to what trick it was supposed to be really. When Vince Del Valle popped up as the first elephant on parade in “God Save the Label” I was hoping to see how it turned out, since that maneuver wasn’t in his “Diagonal” clip… alas, not. But there’s plenty of chicken-fried flavor to this part, which includes tricks over pieces of trash and a proper 90’s-style switch` hardflip into a ditch – on a related topic VDV also packs one of the more classical 360 flips in a world gone mad with Brian Boitano flare-foot*. Also nice: the underpass escalator backside lipslide, pictured above, the tailslide to regular on a rail, cruise control on the multicolored bank and the horns chiming in for the helicopter ender.

“Debacle” one of the best? Really? I thought that video was boring and embarrassingly overproduced (Buying and strategically placing cars so you can “spontaneously” smash them up in a very controlled legal punk way…please…)

Watched as much of this as I could on various YouTubers’ accounts yesterday. Haven’t seen Shuriken’s part yet, which is one I’m definitely looking forward to. In my eyes, Peter Raffin’s tomfoolery surpassed VDV’s part. Also radical: Rob Welsh had a baby with Steve Durante, and his name is Ben Skrzypek.

more on the ‘flare foot’ please. watching that Gatlyn dude toss them 3’s is mesmerizing. it’s like the life goes out of his foot following the flip and I don’t understand where the catch comes in…..the jury is out the results.